“Erkmen does not use materials that could be designated as characteristic of her work nor does she have a specific aesthetic or a comprehensive, content-driven message. […] Thus, each work is a new surprise for those who have been following her works for years and for those who encounter her work for the first time, it is an experience.”
René Block
The artist makes architectural interventions, reorganizing the space; as in many of her works, she thus questions notions of architecture, installation, and organization.
Ayşe Erkmen, whose practice and in particular, her site-specific works have been etched in memory, takes the social and physical environment that she is in as a starting point and by repositioning the existing structure in her particular style, impels viewers to think about space. Her works, which make spaces experienceable, do not exhibit a concern with forming a formal language. The artist invites viewers to engage deeply in dialogue with the physical, visual, social, and psychological dimensions of environments such as museum galleries, gallery windows, exhibition spaces, parks, rivers, and squares. The contemporaneity of Ayşe Erkmen’s works is derived from her pointing to the already-existing in different forms. While she makes “sculptural” propositions in her temporary interventions, taking the space as is, in exhibition spaces, she adds on a few “foreign” elements as possible. By reconfiguring the objects and relationships in the spaces that we encounter daily or at times by getting rid of them, disrupting them, she interweaves art and life, forming singular areas. The artist thus makes visible models of socializing that open up reality; the works are complete only when the viewers are present.
With the exhibition Kıpraşım Ripple, Erkmen analyzes the architectural data, activating the walls that were added at Dirimart Dolapdere to transform the raw space into an art gallery. Referring to the constant change that the gallery undergoes for each exhibition, she takes pieces that she has ripped off of these walls, which at times carry traces of past exhibitions, and makes them volitant, hurled across space. The gallery is thus reconstructed, becoming a work rather than an exhibition space. This intervention is accompanied by metal sculptures that give clues of the artist’s reinterpretation of the architectural plan of the gallery and her plans to transform it. A sound installation that articulates the main transportation artery through Pangaltı that the gallery is situated on, carrying inside the exhibition space the moments of moving to and from the space physically.
